CU Boulder leading Pac-12 study on athletes' health

Players have fun with Sefo Liufau during the University of Colorado football practice on Aug. 24, 2016.

Researchers at the University of Colorado have embarked on an exhaustive health study of intercollegiate athletes funded by the Pac-12 athletic conference.

The university was awarded $750,000 for the two-year study, which began this month when first-year student-athletes arrived on campus.

Researchers are interested in the athletes' overall, long-term health. In a news release, Matt McQueen, director of CU's Public Health Program, said the study is not about maximizing athletic performance.

"Healthier athletes do tend to be better-performing athletes, but this is not a football study. This is not a track study. A lot of research goes into shaving seconds off times in those sports," McQueen said in the news release. "This is about all our student athletes -- male and female. These are athletes competing in the Pac-12, and there's a lot of pressure on them to perform at an optimal level. We want to aggressively pursue gaps in this area of research, such as overheating in female athletes. We know that muscle fatigue leads to injury, but what can we do to help prevent that?"

McQueen said he hopes to study all 350 CU scholarship athletes. Much of the data will come from surveys about their overall health, stress, cognition and sleep patterns.

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